Did the ancient Greeks know the artichoke, that thistle kin gone six feet tall and extra-prickly? More than a few food historians think not, arguing that Cynara scolymus was bred from its cousin, the cardoon, at the hands of Arab traders in the Middle Ages. There are virtues to their arguments, but then comes a passage from the poet Hesiod, who lived around 700 BC and knew his way around farms, gardens, and wild places alike:

But when the artichoke flowers, and the chirping grasshopper sits in a tree and pours down his shrill song continually from under his wings in the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of a heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the ever-flowing spring which pours down unfouled, thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.

In other words, when the artichoke flowers, then the weather is on the verge of turning hot—and hot as it can be only in the islands of the south-central Mediterranean, where great winds pour northward from the Sahara and sand-blast everything they encounter, making of Sicily, the artichoke’s probable place of origin, a semidesert with more than a few African connections.

The Greeks certainly knew the artichoke, for they colonized Sicily thousands of years ago. The Romans knew it, too, their elite having developed a fondness for eating the leaves. Charlemagne knew it; he ordered that it be grown in the gardens of his many palaces, but though he loved artichokes, he could never get the citizens of the Holy Roman Empire to share his enthusiasm, and it was left to Catherine de’ Medici to reintroduce their cultivation to France in the sixteenth century, thus assuring her reputation as a harlot—for only a woman of loose virtues, the courtiers of Paris whispered, would eat a food well known to have aphrodisiacal properties.

The word must have gotten around, and the artichoke became the pep pill of the Renaissance. Writing in The Culture of the Fork, Italian food historian Giovanni Rebora notes that in a Genoese market of the late sixteenth century, three hundred grams of meat could be had for two soldis, whereas a single artichoke cost two and a half soldis and a single cabbage top cost a soldi. Now, greens are often thought of as poor people’s food, but cooked greens tend to be expensive, since they yield comparatively little bulk or protein; even so, the disparity can only be explained by some extracurricular demand, which explains why tongues went wagging when Catherine filled her stomach to bursting with the first artichokes of the new harvest.

Though Arabs were also known to enjoy artichokes, further clouding its reputation in certain quarters of Europe, knowledge of the artichoke eventually spread north and west, and by the Georgian era the upper crust in Germany and England made it a point to enjoy artichokes, even though the frost-sensitive things had to be imported at considerable expense. The advent of quicker transport in the nineteenth century reduced those costs somewhat, but even so, the plant was associated with gentlemen and well-groomed country houses, where, as this scene from Thomas Love Peacock’s Gryll Grange (1860) hints, it was likely to be mixed up with the wholly unrelated Jerusalem artichoke, a kin of the sunflower native not to Palestine but North America:

“Palestine soup!” said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, dining with his friend Squire Gryll; “a curiously complicated misnomer. We have an excellent old vegetable, the artichoke, of which we eat the head; we have another of subsequent introduction, of which we eat the root, and which we also call artichoke, because it resembles the first in flavour, although, me judice, a very inferior affair. This last is a species of the helianthus, or sunflower genus of the Syungenesia frustranea class of plants. It is therefore a girasol, or turn-to-the-sun. From this girasol we have made Jerusalem, and from the Jerusalem artichoke we make Palestine soup.”

A misnomer piled on a misunderstanding: some English speaker misheard girasole, the Italian word for sunflower, as Jerusalem, and the two species were confounded.

In the United States, Cynara scolymus was barely known outside Mediterranean immigrant communities in California until the 1960s, when California growers made a push to introduce it to the larger market. It worked, if slowly, and if only to an extent; even now, the entire industry generates less than a single Hollywood film with the right lead. Almost all of the artichokes grown in the United States come from California, and almost all of those come from the Salinas and Monterey areas, where the warm days and cool, foggy nights appeal to the artichoke’s core—that is, the flower bud, the heart that artichoke aficionados prize so dearly, scraping away at leaf after leaf until they finally unwrap the prize.

It’s a small payoff for all that work, some might say, but there are good reasons to eat artichokes, provided they are well cooked. They are fat-free, cholesterol-free, and low in calories, though this will depend on the age of the artichoke. Artichokes also provide goodly doses of vitamin C, dietary fiber, magnesium, and folate. Cynarin, a compound extracted from artichokes, has anti-inflammatory and cholesterol-lowering properties and helps lower blood sugar, all useful qualities in this pudgy, sugary age.

And who knows? They might just have the qualities Catherine de’ Medici sought—after all, Marilyn Monroe herself was California’s first Miss Artichoke, which must mean something. All of which would make the artichoke, though ever expensive, a lot cheaper than other remedies on the current market.

Carciofi alla Giudea

Whenever we’re in Rome, my wife and I make it a point to call on Giorgio Sermoneta, a much-admired couturier, businessman, and bon vivant who knows where the best restaurants are tucked away—and who serves a fine gelato himself, as visitors to his shops along the Piazza di Spagna will discover. Most of those restaurants serve some variation of a local favorite, once confined to the Jewish Ghetto. “Jewish artichokes,” as they’re called, resemble flowers once they’re cooked, and they’re altogether delicious.

Cut each artichoke so that only a short stem protrudes from the bottom. Cut the top of the head off flat and remove the outer leaves. Blanch for 20–30 seconds in boiling salted water, then allow the artichokes to cool and drain on paper towels. Smack the bottom of the artichokes on a wooden cutting board or pizza stone so that the “flowers” open up a little. Sprinkle salt and pepper inside the leaves. Heat olive oil in a deep skillet and cook the artichokes, stalk upward at first, then turning so that all sides are cooked. Serve with lemon wedges.

Mariangela Rinaldi and Mariangela Vicini, social historians and gastronomes from the fabled city of Parma, add this twist in a recipe from their book Buon Appetito, Your Holiness: cook the artichokes in a heatproof earthenware dish. Then “bring a bowlful of water close to the earthenware dish, dip a hand in, and then sprinkle a few drops of water into the oil. This is the secret for giving the artichokes that final extra crispness.”